#53: how to choose new opportunities

👋 Welcome to the 53rd issue of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter promoting ideas to help get 1% better everyday.

I’m Reza, and every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter.

I’ve been a fan of Ludovico Einaudi’s work ever since December 2008 when Lars, a friend of mine from university, gifted me a CD of his work. The Italian musician has also consistently appeared on my Spotify Wrapped year over year, and composed the scores for one of my all-time favourites, The Intouchables.

While on a North American tour recently, he stopped by the NPR office to play for a Tiny Desk set. His latest album (Underwater) captures how many have felt during the pandemic.

With that slightly different intro, let’s explore this week’s ideas…

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In this issue:

📝 Underrated life skills

💭 Obligation vs Compulsion

⏳ Don’t optimize your downtime

🗓 The days are long but the decades are short

🛤 Explore or exploit? How to choose new opportunities

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📝 Underrated life skills

How to stop taking things personally

When people criticize you or reject you, it likely has way more to do with them —their values, their priorities, their life situation — than it does with you.

How to be persuaded and change your mind

How confident can you be in your own beliefs if you’ve never challenged them, if you’ve never seen the other side?

How to act without knowing the result

Sometimes you just have to do things for no other reason than to do them. Do them because you can. Because they exist.

→ 11-min read

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💭 Obligation vs Compulsion

I am most inspired by people who do the thing that they are best at and enjoy doing. The thing that only they can do.

I’m inspired by people who do something so important to them that they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if they didn’t do it.

Conversely, people that rub me the wrong way are those who operate their lives from a place of obligation. From a place of “I need to, because I should”. “Should” doesn’t move mountains. Compulsion does.

→ 7-min read

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⏳ Don’t optimize your downtime

Taking time off and doing nothing productive made me feel guilty. Like, I was wasting my limited time on this planet on fruitless endeavours.

Optimizing downtime hasn't made me more productive either. It has slowly pushed me down a path of burnout.

We need time to catch a breath, relax our minds, and feed our brains some fun candy. It's okay not to work all the time.

→ 3-min read

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🗓 The days are long but the decades are short

Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.

Get rid of distractions in your life.

Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.

Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.

→ 5-min read

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🛤 Explore or exploit? How to choose new opportunities

There is no doubt that for many of us time is our most precious resource. So when deciding between whether to enjoy what you have or search for something better, adding time to your decision-making process can help point the way.

Not all of our explorations are going to lead us to something better, but many of them are. Not all of our exploitations are going to be satisfying, but with enough exploration behind us, many of them will. Failures are, after all, just information we can use to make better explore or exploit decisions in the future.

→ 6-min read

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✨ One last thing…

“Don't even bother catching up.

Because by the time you get there, everybody else is already somewhere else.

So instead, go where no one else is.”

—Yann Girard

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👋 Until next week,

Reza